Community Supported Agriculture for the Upper Valley of New Hampshire and Vermont

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We originally received “certified organic” status back in 2000 through the Northeast Organic Farmers’ Association of Vermont. A few years later, the term “organic” became officially defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the organic standards were nationalized. In the larger marketplace, this has been a good thing - sales of organic produce have soared in recent years as regulations have been streamlined from coast to coast. The amount of acreage in the U.S. that is now managed organically has also soared.

But something has been lost in all this: the locally focused, soil-based, low-input ethos that first defined organic agriculture in this country, especially here in New England, has faded away, to be replaced by enormous farms that often consume more fossil fuel than their conventional cousins. Meanwhile, the organic standards were lowered to the least common denominator and the paperwork requirements went up.

In the spring of 2007, after consulting with many of you and thinking carefully about the implications, I decided to let my official certification lapse. My reasoning was both practical (save the money and time devoted to paperwork) and philosophical (organic agriculture, as currently defined, is not, in my humble opinion (or IMHO as the bloggers say on the web) good enough.) Following is the letter I sent to NOFA-VT outlining my thinking. Feel free to ask me anything about how we grow our crops here at Sunrise, and rest assured that, even though we no longer have the official certificate hanging on the barn wall, we’re just as “organic” as we’ve ever been.

________________

Nicole Dehne
VOF / NOFA-VT
P.O. Box 697
Richmond, VT 05477

April 2007

Dear Nicole:

I’m writing to say that I’ve decided not to apply for re-certification of my vegetable operation this year. The reasons are a mix of the pragmatic and the philosophical.

1) My vegetables are sold straight off the farm through a 50-share CSA. Each of my customers knows me personally. When I polled them last fall about the importance of certification, nearly all declared that they would join the CSA regardless of formal certification.

2) Because I’m a part-time farmer, the 8 or so hours required each year to handle the certification paperwork add up to about 1 percent of my time. Throw in the cost of certifying, and the whole process reduces my hourly wage by close to 50 cents.

3) In the first few years of being certified, the NOFA inspectors who came to my farm knew vastly more than I did about farming and were very generous with their advice. But now that I’m more experienced, and now that the USDA prevents certified farmers from inspecting one another, the situation has started to reverse.

4) In the early days of organic, “local” was indivisible from the concept. Today, organic vegetables are likely to travel just as far as all other vegetables.

5) Fossil fuel. On the most important ecological issue of the day, burning fossil fuels, the organic regulations are silent. Many organic vegetables now require just as much oil and gasoline as conventionally produced vegetables. This strikes me as incompatible with the “self-sufficient” ideal that used to underpin organic agriculture.

6) Wal Mart. If multi-national retail behemoths can meet the specs, then the specs have no real meaning in a small marketplace like Vermont.

I plan to continue being a member of NOFA-VT and supporting the great work that you all are doing on behalf of Vermont’s farmers. (Indeed, I would have dropped my certification the minute that organic went national except that I wanted to keep supporting NOFA-VT.) I also plan to continue meeting or exceeding the organic standards. Just not as a certified farmer, at least for now.

Sincerely,

Chuck Wooster
Sunrise Farm CSA
White River Junction, Vermont